Server room vs. data center

Server Room vs. Data Center, where is your company's IT infrastructure operated?

Many people use the terms server rooms and data centers interchangeably, but they are not quite the same. There are distinct concepts with unique characteristics  in terms of roles and functions. As technology advances and businesses rely increasingly on digital solutions, understanding the difference between a server room and data center has become crucial. 

At its core, server room and data center are facilities designed to house IT equipment. However, they differ in terms of capacity, purpose, and infrastructure. Understanding these differences can help businesses make better decisions when selecting, designing, or upgrading their IT environment. Let's take a closer look at what sets these two facilities apart.

Server Room

A server room is area or room specifically designed and allocated to store IT equipment, including servers, storage, and network devices on your premises.

Companies must invest in environmental cooling systems, fire suppression, uninterruptible power supplies, security, and airflow planning. The most significant benefit of on-premises server room is business' control over facilities. With this complete control, business can manage the various aspects of their assets including decide when to invest in new resources or expand business’ capabilities by adding new equipment. Having control over facilities also means that your team's workload will be pretty high. It includes monitoring facilities to continuously observe whether the equipment is functioning properly. Since the IT equipment is highly sensitive to temperature and humidity, the server room should maintain specific level of temperature and humidity. Without this, IT equipment not only process business workloads but also being shortened their lifecycles, leading to increased investment and operating costs. Up-front spending is significant when you invest in your own on-site servers. It's generally difficult to know how much capacity you'll need for growth. This means you could purchase a system that's either more powerful than you need or that isn't able to grow as your data needs expand.

Setting up a server room space in an office space, business may have limitations of scalability of IT equipment due to their dependency on the capacity and performance of the buildings they are located in for power and cooling.

Data Center (Data centre)

A data center is an entire building that is wholly used to facilitate a large amount of IT equipment. The biggest differences from server room are scale, scalability, and efficiency. A data center not only provides the basic functions of uninterruptable power supply and temperature and humidity control to ensure the operation of IT equipment  but also offers scalability. The importance of scalability is increasing, as workloads that consume a significant amount of power, such as artificial intelligence and autonomous driving, are rapidly growing.

Types of data center

data centers are classified based on their scale, ownership,  and technical usage. There are three main types of data centers, including enterprise, commercial(colocation), and edge data centers.

Enterprise data center : 100% owned and controlled by companies.

Commercial data center (Colocation) : Colocation facilities are owned by commercial data center provider. The company provides IT equipment, and the commercial data center provides and manages the infrastructure, including physical space,  power,  network, cooling and security systems. Colocation is appealing to business that want to avoid the large capital expenditures associated with building and maintaining their own data centers.

Edge data center : Smaller facilities located geographically close to the edge of the network and populations in order to solving the latency problem. These serve that deliver cloud computing resources and cached content to populations.

Functions of data center

Space: Provides a secure area for housing IT equipment.
Power: Supplies sufficient and redundant power to IT equipment.
Temperature and Humidity: Ensures complete control of temperature and humidity to maintain IT equipment in optimal environment.
Connectivity: Offers redundant network to IT equipment.

Availability: Ensures uninterrupted supply of power, temperature and humidity control, and connectivity.

Scalability: Provides flexibility for expanding IT equipment.
Safety: Guarantees safety from intrusions, fires, natural disasters, or any other incidents.
Efficiency: Offers energy efficiency to reduce data center operational costs and contribute to environmental protection.

Which is best for your business?

Regardless of whether it is a Server Room, Enterprise Data Center, or Commercial Data Center, growing of computing and network resources consumed by business workloads make functions and roles listed above become essential for any space hosting IT equipment.  The traditional server room is might not the best way to manage your IT infrastructure. As we’ve seen above, the initial setup costs and ongoing maintenance or upgrades could be prohibitively expensive for small businesses. Even larger enterprises are avoiding upgrades or rebuilds to server rooms because they don’t scale quickly or support an increasingly remote workforce.  Understanding key differences between server rooms and data centers, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each, will help your determine which is best for your business and right for your digital transformation strategy.

Featured images via gettyimages.

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